While our entire society needs that at the moment, and that’s another column for another time, someone needs to be that in high school baseball and officially set a pitch count limit that makes sense and will help to reduce injuries in high school baseball players. While it is fine to say they should be watching out for themselves, as a former athlete, very few ever think of their own well being between the lines.

Too many of us, throughout this nation, are willing to sit back and let someone else bear the brunt of the decisions that are made, or in some cases, are not. They don’t speak up or challenge the status quo.

So let’s play the game I like to call: Who’s to blame? The kid, the coach or the parent.

Let’s immediately take the kid out of the equation. The kid is likely to be brought up in a warrior mentality. Everyone from Mike and Mike to every broadcaster on television and radio laud players who put their own welfare on the line.

“What a hero he is to his teammates and the fans,” can be heard from Joe Buck, Vin Scully and any other announcer or writer who has ever graced the airwaves or the pages of a newspaper or other publication.

The kid isn’t the problem, but our society isn’t helping him make a smart decision. If he pulls himself, he faces criticism from anyone with a social media account now.

I fell prey to it myself, going back into football games with countless concussions and other injuries which led to a neck surgery in my 20s, back surgery in my 30s and a knee and shoulders that lay in wait of the knife. Not to mention the MRIs I have yearly to make sure my brain is actually still intact. And those are the only after effects I will tell you about. There certainly are more.

Should the kid know better? Should he or she take responsibility for their future? Has any 16-year-old ever when it comes to their physical wellbeing? I am going to bet most of the people reading this would say no.

How about the parents? I see myself telling my 7-year-old and 2-year-old kids now to “get up, you’ll be fine. Play through it. Don’t cry, that won’t solve anything.”

And I stop myself, but I fear the damage is done. I wake up in pain absolutely every day of my life now, but I play through it, because that is the expectation I have of myself after 37 years. Headaches, backaches, stiff neck, knee so swollen walking is difficult in the fall … but still, I hear “If you can walk, you can play,” from coaches ringing in my ears. I watch how my father battled through cancer and still in his mid-60s hasn’t yet realized he needs to slow down.

“If I slow down, I stop,” he said recently. Talk about a warrior mentality.

So does it fall to the coaches? With the pressure of winning from the community? From the kid telling them, “I’m fine”? For a possibly misguided parent saying “If he says he/she’s fine, they’re fine”?

When someone tells my son “You know your father played football in college?” I fear I will be walking in my parents’ shoes all too quickly. My wife recently asked me “what will we do.” My response, albeit heartbreaking, was “I don’t know. Basically, we can’t do what my parents did. We can’t actually listen to him.” In my parents’ defense, doctors also cleared me time after time and coaches told them they would be watching out for me. I wonder if my stumbling around the field with a concussion so bad I still don’t remember most of that week was what they meant. I only came out of that game when I asked to. I know a coach later asked me if I could go back in, and I immediately put my helmet back on. But I would have laid it all on the line for my teammates. And the bigger issue: If I don’t go back in, I am branded a stronger word than a wimp.

Now while my vast injury experience is in football, this does, in fact, relate back to baseball. In our current culture, which is slowly (too slowly) changing, someone does need to be the adult when it comes to pitch counts and the NFHS (National Federation of State High School Associations) had a golden opportunity here. But it too, failed to be the adult.

Instead of coming up with a solution and saying “follow this or else” the NFHS left it to the member states to come up with their own plan.

So now, the OHSAA (Ohio High School Athletic Association) needs to be the adult. And that’s not an easy task, considering it makes itself easy to find and will actually take the time to listen to the complaints it will undoubtedly face. But the OHSAA needs to be the voice on the mountain here and make sure that a symbolic gesture is not made. There are guidelines out there that several federations have instituted that make sense. It can adopt one of those on its merits and probably feel good about itself.

Or, it can truly be the adult, do its independent research, make its own rules, tell the state of Ohio “I don’t care what your friends do” and make sure it is looking out for the well being of all of its probably more than 5,000 kids that are playing high school baseball.

The decision won’t be easy. Being the adult rarely is.

Henry S. Conte is the sports planning and content coach for the Media Network of Central Ohio. Tell him what you think by emailing him at hconte@gannett.com